Post by bossradio93 on Feb 3, 2004 15:37:11 GMT -5
Stories from back in the day
One night, in another dark restaurant-bar (the Buggy Whip on La Tijera Boulevard near LAX), McDonnell and Krikorian got to talking about nights at the Forum.
"You know how many people I snuck into NBA Finals games? Without tickets?" McDonnell said.
Krikorian: "Same with me. I got about six there for Game 6 of the Celtics and Lakers in '87." (He later changed this number to three.)
McDonnell: "Or the seventh game of the Pistons-Lakers. I had about eight people that I snuck in."
"Sho, remember Sho?" Krikorian said. He was talking about an usher. "He'd let you go right in."
McDonnell: "He was the greatest."
Krikorian: "What was the name of the bartender, Joe?" He was talking about the bartender in the press room.
"Bill Granger," McDonnell said.
Krikorian: "Bill Granger was the bartender there. He got a date of mine so drunk one night she vomited. Karen West [wife of Jerry West] had to help her back into the bathroom. She was a young girl, a young kid, I met her at 24 Hour Fitness…."
McDonnell and Krikorian disagree about how they met. McDonnell says it was on the field at Dodger Stadium; Krikorian says it was in the Laker offices. Both agree they were arguing.
This was the 1970s, when it was easier to be a fan in Los Angeles: The Dodgers were perennial contenders, the city had the Rams. UCLA won with John Wooden and USC with a run of star running backs. Then Magic Johnson arrived in 1979, ushering in Showtime. For the next two decades the landscape changed dramatically: The Rams left, first for Anaheim and then St. Louis, the Raiders came and went, and the Dodgers seemed gradually to fade away too, until the O'Malley family finally sold the team in 1998, turning it into a widget in Rupert Murdoch's media empire News Corp.
Krikorian, who grew up in Fowler, a railroad town outside Fresno, witnessed all of this as a reporter and columnist at the Herald. It is with a faint note of pride that Krikorian informs you that both Chamberlain and Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom died angry at him over something he wrote.
McDonnell was on the scene too, but as a 19-year-old who'd graduated from Alemany High in Mission Hills and then dropped out after a year and a half at Valley College to go into radio. He got reporting experience as a stringer for outlets including AP Radio, Mutual Broadcasting and WFAN in New York. The job involved dispatching locker room quotes and in-game reports. Two bites from the home locker room and two from the visitors' would net him $20.
"With UPI it was $5 per player," McDonnell said.
By the time they were first paired as talk show hosts, on KMPC in 1992, McDonnell had an ego to match Krikorian's.
That may be the only constant in their relationship; off-air they retreat into very different lives, except on those occasions when they're both at Trani's. Krikorian has lived in the same house in Long Beach for 28 years. He's been married twice and has no children; his second wife, Gillian, died two years ago of cancer at age 35. Krikorian brings her up often, warning that he might cry as he relates the details of who she was and how they met — or how, when she was in the hospital, the terminally ill former Laker great Happy Hairston was just down the hall.
McDonnell, who has never been married, recently moved back in with his dad after the death of his mother. He says he's set up a mini-studio at home and some nights does a postgame talk show from his office. He jokes darkly about how he used to hate talk radio and how he wants to retire at 55, but that's hard to believe; one day recently, McDonnell hosted several hours on the anniversary of the JFK assassination on KABC and in the middle of the show, phoned over to KSPN to chime in after the UCLA-USC football game.
Always a tough crowd
Several weeks after their third-anniversary show, McDonnell and Krikorian did a live remote from the home of a sponsor, Martin Cadillac, in West Los Angeles.
Such promotional gigs are as old as radio. This time the chairs and fold-out table were several feet from a hulking Cadillac SUV. Muzak played in the background and a spread of finger food had been put out. Salespeople stood around with no customers.
The hosts kept reminding people to come on down, but no one did, and it was something of a dead week on the sporting scene. College football was between its regular season and bowl games, the NBA season was in its infancy, and the Dodgers were still doing nothing on the free agent front.
So Joe and Doug did what they do: McDonnell kept ripping UCLA's football team for going to the "Silicone Valley Bowl." They heard actor James Caan was in the service department and cackled for an hour about getting him on the air, then trashed Caan when he failed to show. Lasorda, ambassador to himself, called in, and when he hung up, Krikorian speculated about how much the former Dodger manager was worth ($20 million, they agreed). There'd been a trade in the NBA (Portland's Bonzi Wells to Memphis for Wesley Person), but it wasn't worth talking about. So McDonnell opened the phones to whatever, and sports talk was once again about two guys from the hometown, talking into the void.
Los Angeles Radio People-Feb. 1, 2004
One night, in another dark restaurant-bar (the Buggy Whip on La Tijera Boulevard near LAX), McDonnell and Krikorian got to talking about nights at the Forum.
"You know how many people I snuck into NBA Finals games? Without tickets?" McDonnell said.
Krikorian: "Same with me. I got about six there for Game 6 of the Celtics and Lakers in '87." (He later changed this number to three.)
McDonnell: "Or the seventh game of the Pistons-Lakers. I had about eight people that I snuck in."
"Sho, remember Sho?" Krikorian said. He was talking about an usher. "He'd let you go right in."
McDonnell: "He was the greatest."
Krikorian: "What was the name of the bartender, Joe?" He was talking about the bartender in the press room.
"Bill Granger," McDonnell said.
Krikorian: "Bill Granger was the bartender there. He got a date of mine so drunk one night she vomited. Karen West [wife of Jerry West] had to help her back into the bathroom. She was a young girl, a young kid, I met her at 24 Hour Fitness…."
McDonnell and Krikorian disagree about how they met. McDonnell says it was on the field at Dodger Stadium; Krikorian says it was in the Laker offices. Both agree they were arguing.
This was the 1970s, when it was easier to be a fan in Los Angeles: The Dodgers were perennial contenders, the city had the Rams. UCLA won with John Wooden and USC with a run of star running backs. Then Magic Johnson arrived in 1979, ushering in Showtime. For the next two decades the landscape changed dramatically: The Rams left, first for Anaheim and then St. Louis, the Raiders came and went, and the Dodgers seemed gradually to fade away too, until the O'Malley family finally sold the team in 1998, turning it into a widget in Rupert Murdoch's media empire News Corp.
Krikorian, who grew up in Fowler, a railroad town outside Fresno, witnessed all of this as a reporter and columnist at the Herald. It is with a faint note of pride that Krikorian informs you that both Chamberlain and Rams owner Carroll Rosenbloom died angry at him over something he wrote.
McDonnell was on the scene too, but as a 19-year-old who'd graduated from Alemany High in Mission Hills and then dropped out after a year and a half at Valley College to go into radio. He got reporting experience as a stringer for outlets including AP Radio, Mutual Broadcasting and WFAN in New York. The job involved dispatching locker room quotes and in-game reports. Two bites from the home locker room and two from the visitors' would net him $20.
"With UPI it was $5 per player," McDonnell said.
By the time they were first paired as talk show hosts, on KMPC in 1992, McDonnell had an ego to match Krikorian's.
That may be the only constant in their relationship; off-air they retreat into very different lives, except on those occasions when they're both at Trani's. Krikorian has lived in the same house in Long Beach for 28 years. He's been married twice and has no children; his second wife, Gillian, died two years ago of cancer at age 35. Krikorian brings her up often, warning that he might cry as he relates the details of who she was and how they met — or how, when she was in the hospital, the terminally ill former Laker great Happy Hairston was just down the hall.
McDonnell, who has never been married, recently moved back in with his dad after the death of his mother. He says he's set up a mini-studio at home and some nights does a postgame talk show from his office. He jokes darkly about how he used to hate talk radio and how he wants to retire at 55, but that's hard to believe; one day recently, McDonnell hosted several hours on the anniversary of the JFK assassination on KABC and in the middle of the show, phoned over to KSPN to chime in after the UCLA-USC football game.
Always a tough crowd
Several weeks after their third-anniversary show, McDonnell and Krikorian did a live remote from the home of a sponsor, Martin Cadillac, in West Los Angeles.
Such promotional gigs are as old as radio. This time the chairs and fold-out table were several feet from a hulking Cadillac SUV. Muzak played in the background and a spread of finger food had been put out. Salespeople stood around with no customers.
The hosts kept reminding people to come on down, but no one did, and it was something of a dead week on the sporting scene. College football was between its regular season and bowl games, the NBA season was in its infancy, and the Dodgers were still doing nothing on the free agent front.
So Joe and Doug did what they do: McDonnell kept ripping UCLA's football team for going to the "Silicone Valley Bowl." They heard actor James Caan was in the service department and cackled for an hour about getting him on the air, then trashed Caan when he failed to show. Lasorda, ambassador to himself, called in, and when he hung up, Krikorian speculated about how much the former Dodger manager was worth ($20 million, they agreed). There'd been a trade in the NBA (Portland's Bonzi Wells to Memphis for Wesley Person), but it wasn't worth talking about. So McDonnell opened the phones to whatever, and sports talk was once again about two guys from the hometown, talking into the void.
Los Angeles Radio People-Feb. 1, 2004